Author: Mark Hannam

As a child, I was encouraged to cultivate good habits and discouraged from acquiring bad ones.   An example of a good habit might have been brushing my teeth each night before I went to bed; an example of a bad habit might have been eating too much sugary food.   Another good habit was taking regular exercise; another bad habit was smoking cigarettes.  From a child’s perspective, good habits always needed to be cultivated – that is, they needed regular work and attention – because they were not things that one would have done instinctively.  Given the choice, plenty of sugar and no toothpaste would seem far more enjoyable.  Likewise, the appeal of bad habits called for an effort of resistance, since they held out the promise of immediate gratification, whatever worries one might have about long-term harms.  I learned that nurturing the right habits is hard work, requiring us to swim against the flow of pure contentment, against our natural predilection for easy pleasures.

As an adult, I have come to regard this approach as too simplistic.  For sure, it matters that we make good choices about daily health and hygiene, but it matters more that our habits – both of behaviour and thought – are truly ours, that is, that they are chosen by us rather than adopted unreflectively.   Habitual ways of thinking and acting are bad for us not just when they lead us into foolish or unhealthy actions, but also when they are acquired without thoughtful consent.  Just as the smoke from someone else’s cigarette can damage our lungs, so too the passive acquisition of habits can damage our character. 

Continue reading “Habitual”

At the start of this year, my aunt died.  A couple of months previously she had celebrated her one hundredth birthday.  I did not know her well because she lived most of her life in the Canadian Province of Saskatchewan.  I first met her in my mid-teens when she returned to the Britain for a visit, her first trip back in thirty years.  In her seventies and eighties, she returned a few times to see old friends and to visit her sister, who is my mother.  I remember her sense of humour, for example, asking advice of my daughter, then in her early teens, on whether she should get a navel-piercing or a tattoo to celebrate her ninetieth birthday.  She told us some entertaining stories about her escapades in London in the 1930s.  It turns out that young women in her day used similar tricks to charm their way into bars and get drinks bought for them when underage as they do nowadays.  In the early 1940s she met, fell in love with, and married a Canadian soldier, who was later injured fighting in Italy.  At the end of the war, she emigrated from her home in South London to Canada, disembarking the boat at Halifax and moving to Rouleau and later Moose Jaw, where she spent most of her life, and finally, five years ago, to a retirement home in Medicine Hat.

Last week, as I was walking along the main road that runs south from Borough Market, I saw a blue plaque fixed to the wall, memorialising the birthplace of John Harvard.  Like my aunt, he travelled from Southwark to North America, although he went three hundred years before her, and not as a war-bride but as a minister of religion.  Unlike my aunt, he died young, aged thirty-one and is mostly remembered now because in his will he left some books and a few pounds to establish a small college in Massachusetts. 

Continue reading “Migrative”

According to Alfred North Whitehead, “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”  

When I was a student, I thought this to be a harsh verdict on Aristotle and every other major philosopher who came after him, as if precedence in time implied precedence in rank.  I also found it to be an unintentional but nevertheless amusing parody of many philosophy books and papers that I read, in which the amount of space devoted to footnotes or endnotes appeared almost equal to that allocated to the main text.   Some philosophers seemed content to be the authors of series of footnotes.   Later, I came across the sentence which immediately follows that quoted above, where Whitehead continues, “I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings. I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them”.   Now the remark made more sense: it is the richness and variety of Plato’s philosophical interests which impresses, more than his proposed solutions to the many puzzles that he, through the voice of Socrates, draws our attention to.

Continue reading “Doing philosophy down in the docks”

I have been listening to John Coltrane.  More particularly, I have been watching a studio performance by his Quintet from 1961, of his interpretation of the song, “My Favorite Things”, written by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein a couple of years earlier. There is much to admire in this old black and white archive recording, including a delightful piano solo by McCoy Tyner, who died last month, and some under-stated yet compelling percussion by Elvin Jones.  Then there is Coltrane himself, the great saxophonist, finding ample scope for virtuosic improvisation within the formal structure of the verses, drawing out many shades of colour and contrast around the melodic line that – seemingly – he alone knew might be hiding there.  Listening to him play is better than eating schnitzel with noodles. 

Continue reading “Arodnap”

When I was a small child, history taught at school comprised a series of stories, each one recounting the great deeds of some famous man or, occasionally, famous woman.  I imagine that each country has its own selection of national heroes and heroines, exemplars for the young, whose exploits are re-told to each generation of children: Robin Hood in England, Joan d’Arc in France, William Tell in Switzerland, and Paul Revere in New England.  And, if you live in Argentina, I guess it will now be Diego Maradona.   

Continue reading “Beckettmas”